Few figures loom larger in the effort to corporatize education than former District of Columbia Schoosl Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Relentlessly self-promoting, Rhee has pushed a simple formula for education reform: just break the teachers’ unions, force out “bad” teachers (as measured by test scores), and everything will be super-awesome. Rhee has relentlessly touted and been touted for her successes in Washington, and since resigning last year, she’s been working to raise $1 billion to fight teachers’ unions, as well as advising Florida Gov. Rick Scott on education reform.
When union-supporting thugs like me point out that Rhee’s formula seems to be “1. Bust Unions, 2. ???, 3. Profit!”, Rhee’s defenders (including Davis Guggenheim, who featured her in Waiting for “Superman;” and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie) point to her successes in Washington, and simply argue that Rhee’s track record — as measured by test scores — speaks for itself.
Except, well, there’s a problem with Rhee’s track record. It turns out that it may have been the result, not of Rhee’s brilliant leadership, but of cheating:
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its “shining stars.”
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.
Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
A closer look at Noyes, however, raises questions about its test scores from 2006 to 2010. Its proficiency rates rose at a much faster rate than the average for D.C. schools. Then, in 2010, when scores dipped for most of the district’s elementary schools, Noyes’ proficiency rates fell further than average.
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
Now, Rhee’s defenders may counter that Noyes’ cheating isn’t Rhee’s fault. And in some sense, they may be right — Rhee did create a pattern where she rewarded test scores above everything else, fired principals and teachers for not meeting ludicrous goals, and financially rewarded them for making questionable gains. But there’s no evidence that she herself was erasing and correcting answers.
Still, a school chancellor who cared more about her students than test scores would want to get to the bottom of something like this immediately. After all, if test scores say a child is proficient when they aren’t, they’re not going to get the kind of help they actually need to succeed. Surely, Rhee jumped all over this, right?
SA TODAY examined testing irregularities in the District of Columbia’s public schools because, under Rhee, the system became a national symbol of what high expectations and effective teaching could accomplish. Federal money also was at play: Last year, D.C. won an extra $75 million for public and charter schools in the U.S. government’s Race to the Top competition. Test scores were a factor.
USA TODAY initially looked at Noyes only because of its high erasure rates. Later, the newspaper found that Wayne Ryan, the principal from 2001 to 2010, and the school had been touted as models by district officials. They were the centerpiece of the school system’s recruitment ads in 2008 and 2009, including at least two placed in Principal magazine.
“Noyes is one of the shining stars of DCPS,” one ad said. It praised Ryan for his “unapologetic focus on instruction” and asked would-be job applicants, “Are you the next Wayne Ryan?”
[…]
In 2008, the office of the State Superintendent of Education recommended that the scores of many schools be investigated because of unusually high gains, but top D.C. public school officials balked and the recommendation was dropped.
Well, of course. Because Noyes was getting the results Rhee wanted. She didn’t want to investigate because an investigation might show that her gains were ephemeral. She didn’t want to investigate because it might wreck the narrative. In 2009, after another round of questions, the district ran a cursory investigation, but there’s no evidence they were digging too hard.
After the 2009 tests, the school district hired an outside investigator to look at eight D.C. public schools –– one of them was Noyes, USA TODAY learned — and to interview some teachers.
John Fremer, president of Caveon Consulting Services, the company D.C. hired, says the investigations were limited. The teachers were asked what they knew about the erasure rates but not whether cheating had taken place, Fremer says. They told Caveon that they “did what they were supposed to do and they didn’t do anything wrong,” he says.
And lest one think that this is a practice limited to Noyes, there questions at other schools as well.
McGraw-Hill’s practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman’s terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.
In 2008, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) — the D.C. equivalent of a state education department –– asked McGraw-Hill to do erasure analysis in part because some schools registered high percentage point gains in proficiency rates on the April 2008 tests.
Among the 96 schools that were then flagged for wrong-to-right erasures were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out so-called TEAM awards “to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff,” as the district’s website says. Noyes was one of these.
Rhee bestowed more than $1.5 million in bonuses on principals, teachers and support staff on the basis of big jumps in 2007 and 2008 test scores.
At three of the award-winning schools — Phoebe Hearst Elementary, Winston Education Campus and Aiton Elementary — 85% or more of classrooms were identified as having high erasure rates in 2008. At four other schools, the percentage of classrooms in that category ranged from 17% to 58%.
Now, Rhee’s defenders will no doubt point out that there could be innocent explanations for all this. Maybe the teachers were coaching students to erase excessively, to change answers repeatedly. It’s possible. It was also possible that Bernie Madoff really was earning the kind of returns he was reporting. It’s just passing unlikely.
And ultimately, it was students in Washington who paid the price. Parents who might have had concerns about their children were given information that said they shouldn’t worry. There were, no doubt, students whose parents may have tried to coach them in math or reading who didn’t, because their test scores showed they were doing fine. Sure, it doesn’t seem like little Johnny or Susie is proficient in addition, but the test scores say they are — so why worry about that?
This won’t dent Rhee’s reputation among those who have been pushing her star aloft. After all, Rhee’s argument — that unions are all that prevents us from having a perfect education system — is perfectly in sync with the thinking of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, or Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The fact that her best results are now under an ethical cloud won’t matter to people who want to marginalize public unions or a party whose presidential candidates are openly attacking the very idea of public education.
But to those of us who care about the education of the next generation, this should give us pause. Because it’s not just Rhee’s love affair with breaking unions that this scandal calls into question. The fact is that when we make high-stakes testing the only measure of educational achievement, we guarantee that some schools will cheat to meet the arbitrary bars of “success” that we create for them.
I’m not saying that we should eliminate standardized testing. Useful data can come from it. But standardized testing is not the end-all and be-all of educational measurements. As a parent, I’ve never gotten any information on my daughter’s standardized tests that was a shock or surprise to me. I have heard information from her teachers, however, that has spurred her mother and I to action. Why? Because her teachers know her far more than a computer possibly can.
I care about my daughter’s education. And I certainly want to improve the quality of our nation’s education system. But the answers to that are not simple, not easy, and don’t begin and end with punishing teachers. Rhee represents the worst impulses of the current education reform movement, but she’s far from alone. If we as a society want to truly improve education, we need to start asking tough questions, and passing on too-easy solutions. After all, that’s what we were taught to do in school.
So I was curious about this, and I asked an acquaintance of mine who has experience on both sides of the battle lines you draw — she’s worked for the American Federation of Teachers as well as Teach for America (not as a corps member).
Her opinion on Rhee, particularly in DC, was that she was right that the system there was badly calcified and needed to be shaken up, and that in that sense her crack-some-skulls mentality was desperately needed and the right tactic (and I agree with her). On the other hand, she said, Rhee’s problem — which she shares with a lot of TFAers — is that she doesn’t understand that an entire workforce can’t get by on passion alone, and that Rhee doesn’t have a very good grasp on the legitimate concerns of the unions, the school board, and the local parental population — they get lost in the shuffle as Rhee bulls ahead.
I also asked if it was fair to characterize Rhee, as you do, as a union-buster. She said that was grossly unfair — that while there were certainly tensions between Rhee and teachers unions, that is not what Rhee is doing (aside from her time at AFT, my friend has been pretty active working with unions, including being part of campaigns to prevent a union from being busted). She also pointed out that TFA’s leadership structure is almost entirely made up of teachers — it’s not like they have no knowledge or concern about the important benefits unions have won and the need to keep them around. They do believe passionately in certain reforms they think are necessary, and don’t have a lot of patience with unions to the extent they block them from going into effect.
There are serious communication problems, and I mean that as a substantive concern (i.e., it’s not just “oh, if only she explained herself better, everyone would be on board” — not really paying attention to legitimate issues raised by stakeholders is a serious substantive flaw). And, I’ll add, I’m pretty hostile to the obsessive test-focus either. But to say her DC approach was centered around busting the teacher’s union simply isn’t accurate, or a fair characterization.
Man, being exposed by USA Today is kind of like being taken down by Aquaman, innit?
This is what I’ve always hated about the education system in this country – standardized tests are not the best way to show if someone is actually learning anything. Are kids being taught the skills they need for the future, or are they being taught how to take tests?
@David: Thank you for such a nuanced take on a complex issue. When I saw the Waiting for “Superman” documentary, I was appalled by the awful difficulties a lot of kids face in trying to get a decent education, but the film’s evident anti-union stance alarmed me – a feeling that’s only grown in light of the attempted union-busting going on in the states at the moment.
@Angel: I felt the same way when I was at high school here in Britain. At 15, I asked my French teacher about a particular grammatical construction, and was told, “You don’t need to know that for the exam.” That was one moment (out of many) when it was crystal clear that I was there to pass an exam, not to learn French. While I understand the need for some form of standardized oversight to ensure that kids are actually being taught something, testing risks being seen as the telos of education – which it clearly isn’t. But I don’t know what the answer is.
No, they’re usually not.
However, standardized tests are one of the few ways that we can compare students across schools, states, and years. As such, they’re a very valuable tool. Absent standardized tests of some sort, it is next to impossible to know if Mary is a better teacher than Bob, or if the West End school is doing a better job in math than the South Heights school.
It also gives teachers a way to look at their class. If you think your students are smart and learning fast and you think you’re doing a bangup job teaching but it turns out that they all bomb the SAT compared to other classes, (or if the reverse is true) it provides an opportunity for you to evaluate and perhaps recalibrate your assessment of your teaching and/or your students’ skills.
That doesn’t mean that multiple choice tests are ideal, of course. They represent an obvious tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy. The more advanced exams like the AP Calculus exam have a lot of stuff that isn’t multiple choice–but they’re harder to grade, and more expensive to give, and thus can’t easily be given to every student. And a lot of stuff like “is the student able to figure out a complex problem in 24 hours, and can they communicate their results to others?” is almost impossible to test in a standard and objective fashion.
Well, let me turn that question around for a moment, and ask a few of my own:
1) what skills are you talking about?
2) can those skills be tested or measured?
2a) if so, then what’s wrong with testing of measuring them? Is this really a complaint about the focus of the curriculum, rather than the existence of testing?
2b) If not, then how would you know whether kids are being taught the skills, and how do you propose evaluating the efficiency of teachers/schools/districts in providing those skills?
No Child Left Behind and its variants have been around for quite a while. I haven’t seen any interviews with students who’ve been educated that way, nor with their employers. I would dearly like to see both.
Regarding the OP:
In SOME sense?
Bullshit.
They’re not right “in some sense” or in “some way” or “to the extent that their statements actually match the facts.”
No, they’re plain old RIGHT. And the fact that you can’t even admit that is fucking unbelievable.
Noyes’ cheating is not Rhee’s fault. If Noyes cheated but other schools did not, then Noyes’ cheating is almost certainly the fault of the teacher(s) and principal(s) and administrators involved. Not Rhee. Rhee may have done other things wrong (actually I’m nearly certain she did) but she didn’t do that.
Mr. Fecke, have you stopped making irresponsible and unethical posts yet?
And you know this, how?
Just out of curiosity: Was the much-vaunted, student-protecting, guardians-of-all-things-good, teachers union also pushing for an investigation and–if warranted–firing? Or were they, too, happy to look the other way and see more teachers stay on? Were they focused only on protecting the faculty of the lowest performing schools?
I ask only because you seem extremely willing to impart nefarious intent to Rhee. In doing so, you are deliberately obscuring the fact that someone ELSE actually did the shit.
That’s not what we would point out at all. Thanks but no thanks for the straw man, though.
Rather, we’d point out that there’s some reasonable expectation of process here. The process is NOT, contrary to your implication, to assume that unusually good answers mean an entire fucking school has decided to collectively cheat on the test. And I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that you’d flip sides in a heartbeat: if Rhee had decided to withhold awards because of her personal belief that the schools were lying, you’d chastise her for failing to live up to her own promises.
Take off the 20/20 hindsight glasses. Rhee had just started doing serious assessments and tying things to
Sure. There’s a price for everything.
So what?
What you conveniently fail to discuss is whether the price is worth it. Since you’re focusing on them: Do you think that Noyes students were worse off than they would have been had Rhee never taken the job at all? Do you think that the entire district as a whole was worse off? Does the error for Noyes erase any other benefits to the entire district?
Heck, even with the cheating the price may be easily worth it. We were able to identify a big bunch of unethical and unprofessional folks and deal with them. We also sent a message regarding compliance.
Your arguments otherwise seems very odd. “Don’t be strict. but if you’re strict and someone violates the law then–even if their violations aren’t very different from what they were doing before you got strict–it’s your fault.”
Unions are by no means the only thing that prevents us from having a perfect education system. They are–in some situations–one of the things that makes it more difficult to have a better education system.
And since you keep bring it up over and over again, I’d be very curious to hear more about the union interaction here. What did the unions do? Were they clamoring for the firing of the Noyes people? Did they push for prompt retesting so that–as you put it–Johnny’s parents would know where Johnny really stood?
Remember: “Rhee bad” =/ “Unions Good.”
And your point is…?
Teacher’s incentives to cheat on behalf of their students can be addressed in a variety of ways, not the least of which is exposure and punishment.
Students’ incentives to cheat have been around for thousands of years and can be addressed any way we want.
Still, even if there are some people who cheat the overall results can still be good.
Imagine that one of the schools on this list cheated on the test:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/list/
Imagine that the others didn’t.
Would that make testing pointless? What level of cheating would you require to accept testing as valid?
I’m flagging this because, for once, i agree with you.
Teachers know a lot of things that testing can’t easily reveal. But testing can reveal a lot of things that teachers don’t necessarily know.
Teachers who give a lot of testing and quizzes are usually better tuned in to that than are teachers who rely on gut feeling.
(for a famous example of the type of information that is different in objective and nonobjective assessments, see https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/)
We agree again.
Does the middle part involve punishing (some, bad) teachers and rewarding (some, good) teachers, in your view?
In my more cynical moments, the thought occurs to me that teaching children how to cheat might be the most valuable life skill they’ll learn in school.
To be more constructive, the problem as I see it is that we have an educational system that was built for one set of goals and is now being asked to serve a very different purpose. For example: In the past, there was an assumption that some people were not suited to education. Children who had particularly low IQ or certain kinds of disabilities or behavior problems were not educated all the way through high school. They were either sent back to their families or put in an institution, and that was not considered a failing of the teachers or the educational system. The system was designed to be effective for most children; those for whom the system was not effective were simply not educated.
Today, the goal is to educate all children, with very few exceptions. I’m all for it, but why are we using the same basic tools to accomplish it? There have been some attempts to “tack on” additional approaches to support atypical students (e.g., inclusion programs), but wouldn’t it make more sense — and be a more efficient use of resources — to design the system around the new goal rather than trying to adapt the existing system? And it’s not just that we’re trying to educate more students. My impression is that the curricular goals have expanded, too. We’ve gone far beyond basic “reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
I’m not keen on blaming teachers for failing to accomplish goals when we don’t give them the right tools for the job.
Perhaps a modest proposal for reforming public pay across public sector jobs will shed some light on the ramifications of this situation.
In-class testing is totally different from standardized testing. I give my calculus students a quiz every week, and I see it as a learning tool — I make sure to get the quizzes back to them within a day or two with my comments and corrections, and we go over them in class, and they can look at what they did and see what they got wrong and what they got right and where their strengths and weaknesses are. And they’re a useful tool for me, too — I can keep much better track of how everybody’s doing when I get that data every week, plus the patterns of who got what right and wrong and how can tell me what I’m doing well and not well. If there are a bunch of people who made a common mistake that I had repeatedly pointed out in class as “This is a common mistake, don’t do it, this is why it’s wrong, this is the right way,” then I can assume those kids just weren’t paying attention. But sometimes there are a bunch of people getting something wrong in the same way and, when I look at it, I can see how they could have come to that wrong conclusion from the way I explained it, so I’ll go back into class the next day and explain it again and make sure to stress the details that didn’t get through the first time.
Of course a teacher who gives a lot of opportunities for in-class assessment will have a better idea of how the students are doing than one who doesn’t. But that doesn’t carry over to standardized testing at all.
Teachers cheat. Freakonomics proved that. Rhee might have been involved, but if so, that is still like the 27th thing wrong with her. Thanks to Jeff to reminding us, though, that Rhee does not want to “shake things up” because that would have resulted in an investigation of the test scores. Rhee’s approach to education simply reflects her acceptance of the nonsense from the right-wing anti-union echo chamber, something very old, but recently revitalized by fear-mongering, racist rhetoric following Obama’s presidential victory. And Waiting for Superman gave the propaganda a sleek, modern package. I must disagree with Jeff, on one thing, though:
Waiting for Superman inadvertently provided the simple answer by showing the many other countries with great education systems and challenging the US to step forward. One detail the movie left out was that every one of these countries also have strong teachers unions. If we want to lead the way, and have a strong educational system, it starts with strong teacher’s unions and well-payed educators.
The simple answer is to raise federal taxes on the rich, and pay teachers what they deserve. And in the meantime, give us Universal Healthcare too, which would result in healthier parents and students, which means smarter, more motivated families. From a rational perspective, the debate is over on these issues, and the only thing stopping their implementation originates from the blitzkrieg of daily lies from AM radio and Fox News, with commentators that tell American workers they are not the exploited proletariat, but “a temporarily embarrassed millionaire” (John Steinbeck).
As long as conservatives continue to convince the American middle-class that the rich are victims of our political system, it won’t matter how many teachers you fire, reprimand, or reward, nothing will change.
Gin-and-whiskey,
I agree with most of what you said re: standardized tests, but I think the main problem is that it assumes that most students learn and process information in the same way. As far as the type of skills are concerned, it goes back to what Rainicorn was saying. I’ve had a similar experience recently where my last history teacher just required us to pass the multiple choice exams. We were never expected to apply what we learned in any thoughtful manner, so I studied just enough to pass the tests. I got an A in that class, but I barely retained anything because it just wasn’t necessary at the time.
http://www.khanacademy.org/video/salman-khan-talk-at-ted-2011–from-ted-com?playlist=Khan%20Academy-Related%20Talks%20and%20Interviews
A bit peripheral, but at about 8:25, Salman Khan explains that promotion based on tests guarantees that students who do adequately on tests get new material which they may not have the background to understand, and (he’s done detailed research based on his educational videos) students learn at different rates, and those who are labeled slow learn quite adequately if they’re given enough time to assimilate the material.
This is John Taylor Gatto territory– he says that conventional education is largely a matter of *creating* winners and losers from students who aren’t all that different from each other.
I entirely agree.
I read something recently that pretty much praised that as the gold standard.
I don’t know that the testing problems stem from students’ learning difference. I think the testing problems are because multiple choice tests usually suck.
Many multiple choice tests don’t actually test what they say they do. Are they testing knowledge? Are they testing reading skills? Reading speed (that’s a HUGE factor?) Writing ability? Error correction? Stamina (some of the tests are all day?) Whether your glasses prescription is correct?
A fast reading speed has nothing to do with English ability, but it probably lets a fast reader halve the error rate on any time-sensitive exam. And what of the student who could produce perfect answers… if only they were allowed to stand up and stretch for one of every 10 minutes? Or the student who knows all the answers and could recite them easily, but who constantly miscodes the bubble sheet? Or the infamous “miss one bubble, miscode all the rest out of order, get everything wrong” problem? And of course there’s the issue of wrong answers: deduct for them, or not?
We like to imagine that the math SAT screens for math ability. We don’t like to think that it also screens for “bubble filling accuracy,” “ability to work in a crowded room,” “ability to work rapidly,” and “ability to focus without stretching your legs” but, of course, it does.
And that’s assuming that the test itself is well written which, of course, is ALSO often not true. It reminds me of a first grade math sheet I recently saw. They were learning addition–they hadn’t learned subtraction yet. The sheet was filled with straight addition problems:
3 + 4 = ______
and so on.
but mixed in there were a few of these:
3+ ___ = 7
To the test designer, that was an addition problem. But, of course, it’s not–it’s actually a subtraction problem that also involves a bit of manipulation to get the question “7-3=____” before answering.
I know at least two people who were thought to have learning disabilities until someone checked their vision and hearing and figured out that that was the problem. With both of them (one who needed glasses, one who needed hearing aids), they grew up in upper-middle class families with very attentive stay-at-home moms and went to what are considered very good public schools, but none of their parents or teachers figured out what the actual problem was — to all these people who interacted with the kid all day, it was either “C can’t follow directions” or “C is disobedient” when actually C hadn’t heard the directions or the rules, and “D can’t read” when D couldn’t see the letter clearly. Also, with both of them, the school nurse had done the yearly hearing and vision tests and said they were fine — the nurse’s office wasn’t big enough to have D as far away from the letter board as he was supposed to be, and when C was told to raise her hand every time she heard a beep, she actually raised her hand every time she saw the nurse press the button that would make the beep. It was their pediatricians who figured out what the problems were. I’d imagine that there are probably a whole lot more kids like that in poorer neighborhoods who end up undiagnosed and just classified as learning disabled or behavior problems because their parents can’t afford a good private pediatrician who can figure out what’s wrong.
Acting head of DC schools asks for an investigation.
(…taken down by Auquaman *smirk*….)